The Victoria-based brother and sister playwriting team had struck a cultural nerve, of sorts, with Castle in the Sky, their docu-drama that explored the community reaction to the grisly 2006 Medicine Hat murders, where a 13-year-old girl and her 23-year-old boyfriend murdered her family.

After telling that story, which was presented by Calgary’s Sage Theatre as part of its 2011 Ignite Festival, the duo needed to step on over to the lighter side of life.

That led them, in a most unexpected manner, to discover Jef Fox, the subject of Ocean Fox, a one-man show set on a small Caribbean island that’s part of the 2013 Ignite Festival, which kicks off Wednesday at the Pumphouse Theatres.

“We needed to do something that was a little lighter and challenge ourselves to see if we could even write a play that didn’t have to be a tragedy,” says Albright.

They discovered their subject while on vacation on Harbour Island, a small Bahamian island, when they hired Fox to take them deep sea fishing.

He was from Connecticut, a free spirit who, 30 years earlier, traded in a sour relationship in Florida for a life as an expat living one of those tropical paradise lives, only Fox’s life was no Richard Branson-style billionaire type scenario.

It was a little more Jimmy Buffett song — Fox living the life a lot of us dream about but one that presents its own set of challenges, as well.

There was the challenge of running a business. There was no family — no wife, no kids, no long-term plan or security. There was that element of being a new face in a closely-knit, island community.

“We spent some time with him on the boat,” says Albright, “And we listened to his stories.

“And he was interested in what we were doing, too, and he just inspired us.”

“His day-to-day life seemed so magnificent,” adds Allen. “It was outrageously stunning, and obviously, the man was charismatic. We just loved to be around him.”

(It didn’t hurt either that, after researching those Medicine Hat murders, they would be forced to research a story set on a small Caribbean island.)

The show itself is a one-man show, with actor Grayson Ogle portraying Fox and 17 other characters. It’s based on dozens of interviews the siblings did with Fox, as well as many members of the Harbour Island community, where Fox ingratiated himself by offering to certify — for free — any Harbour Island resident interested in learning his craft as a scuba diver.

For Sage artistic director Kelly Reay, Ocean Fox is just one of a jam-packed schedule full of shows that the theatre company will feature at the Pumphouse Theatre, (unofficially kicking off with a Wednesday night $50-a-ticket fundraiser for the theatre company).

There’s drama (Fugly by the Janes; Nine Months is an Arbitrary Number by Toronto playwright Adam Collier; The Meaning of Thomas by James Hart, among others).

There’s works in progress (Witiko by Olivia Brooks) and a double-feature of devised creations (The Hudson Bay Epic and Places We Will Never Go).

There’s dance (Launch: The Dance Series, curated by Tina Guthrie).

The company has also transformed downstairs at the Pumphouse into a temporary art gallery, to be curated by Kathryn Blair, and will even have a house band playing music between shows in the theatre’s lobby.

For Reay, the themes the festival explores are dictated by the submissions the theatre receives.

“Every year it’s different,” he says. “It’s all dependent on what submissions you get, and this year, we got quite an eclectic range of submissions, for sure.”

What unifies the festival is that it seeks out emerging artists of every age.

“Most of their applicants tend to be under 30,” says Reay, “but we don’t place an age cap on it.

One such artist is playwright James Hart, being represented at the festival with The Meaning of Thomas.

“He’s decided to shift his focus to playwriting later in life,” Reay says.

As for the play itself?

“It’s kind of a wacky road adventure,” he says, “similar in style in many ways to Summer of My Amazing Luck — it’s (set in) a dozen locations, (and) actors play multiple characters — the characters are constantly moving.”

And if there’s a theme running through this year’s Ignite Festival, it might best be captured in Adam Collier’s Nine Months is an Arbitrary Number.

“It’s a sharp, satiric comedy that sort of takes the piss out of consumer society,” Reay says. “The commodification of everything.

“It’s about a couple who are growing a baby in a jar because . . . they got the sales pitch and bought it hook, line and sinker, and after they bought it, realized there are a bunch of stipulations because they didn’t read the fine print.”

That comedy, along with Ted Stenson’s The Wasp, which explores one man’s attempt to live a consumer life that doesn’t negatively impact anyone, along with Albright and Russell’s in-depth look at a divemaster and deep sea fisherman who dropped out of society and found a different way to make himself happy, all point to a rejection of the 21st-century version of that old Descartes quote: I shop, therefore I am.

For a bunch of emerging artists, there’s more to be learned in the life lessons gleaned from a Caribbean fisherman and scuba diving instructor who didn’t settle into his first real long-term relationship until he turned 63.

By exploring a single life story over the span of three decades, Albright and Allen inadvertently explore an entire era.

“Life on that specific island has changed a lot since he got there,” Albright says. “He was wild and free with his long hair and bare feet and was an adventure maverick — those were his words — and now it’s very different (there).

“So it’s about that, too,” she says. “The passage of time and that kind of freedom, which is all he wanted in the first place.”

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